Bar of the Year 2014: Enso Urban Winery

Think back to the birth of Portland’s craft brewery bars
back in the ’80s and ’90s: It was exciting. Rather than emulating the
off-gassing bunker that was the old Henry Weinhard’s brewery, available
to the public only for guided tours, our craft breweries became part of
the community at large—places where you could hang out, enjoy yourself,
and try the brewery’s freshest experiments.

In the 2010s, Portland’s urban wineries are taking this
very same step, moving out of the formal tasting rooms of the valleys
and into your neighborhoods. But as with all new things, no one knows
what the future is supposed to look like.

Well, we think it should look a lot like Enso Urban
Winery, our 2014 Bar of the Year. After just shy of three years on
Southeast Stark Street, Enso has evolved into nothing less than a new
model for what the wine bar can be.

This is not merely because Enso is part of that new wave
of urban-winery garagistes—although, we’ll admit, we’re suckers for
looking up from our cheese plate and seeing 120 pounds of grapes being
crushed in the backroom, right by a piano that the winery stores for a
musician friend as a favor.

And it’s not just because of the quality of their wine,
although if they hung their hat on their full, fruity zinfandel or their
tannic, leathery mourvèdre, we’d shamelessly drink it right out of that
hat.

What Enso has created is a bar full of excellent local
wine that is casual and pleasant and, most important, completely
unpretentious. It’s comfortable both for the snob and the casual
happy-hour drinker. You could bring a 22-year-old fashion-plate date,
your stern-minded boss or your next-door neighbor, and all would find
themselves served well.

IMAGE: Natalie Behring

The bar’s $5 Resonate reds and whites, blended anew for
each batch, allow the casual weekday visitor to stop in for a few
pleasant glasses—far above the quality of the usual $5 wine quaff at the
neighborhood beer parlor—without recalibrating the food budget. For the
experimentalist, a five-spot of tasters clocks in at an easy $10, while
generous pours of more vintage wines—whether Enso’s own or those of
other Portland urban wineries—might climb as high as $14 for those who
want a more refined tipple.

But where Enso really shines is in the space it creates
for patrons, which invites you to stay awhile and chat, rather than
uncomfortably assess a vintage under the watchful eye of a sommelier.
Because let’s be frank: Wine bars have not historically been that great.
They’re either a fussy-minded, overformal tasting parlor, or an
upper-middle-class drawing room designed to flatter the sensibilities of
theater crowds out for their one bubbly night on the town. Which is to
say, they’re the traditional province of connoisseurs and amateurs.

Even those wine bars in Portland who’ve dodged that Scylla
and Charybdis—think fondly on the lovely Kir (RIP) and the original
incarnation of Noble Rot (RIP)–are often boutiquey or cutely clubby in
spirit, preciously proud of being themselves.

The difference is ease. Enso’s huge sliding garage door
reveals a comfortable space that still shows the remnants of its
blue-collar past, with a painted sign announcing midcentury storage
rates for cars: $1.50 a week, $4 a month. Lived-in couches occupy one
area, barstools another, intimate two- and four-tops another. The
unassuming space remains both cozy and modern, with exposed ductwork and
a massive chalkboard map on the wall showing the local vineyards where
the winery buys its grapes.

Enso evolved, as many of the best places do, as an
improvisation. “I’d been working at a winery down in the Willamette
Valley,” says owner and winemaker Ryan Sharp, “and we were still buying
fruit from other vineyards, going to Washington or Southern Oregon for
fruit. I thought, ‘You know, I could do that in Southeast Portland where
I live.’”

It wasn’t perfect in the first years, however. There were
no savings or money to make over the space, so Enso initially felt less
rough than simply barren, confusing, with aggressive lighting. The
just-minted wines also hadn’t yet aged into their $9 price tags. “It was
all flying blind,” Sharp says. “Half bullshit, half inspiration.”

But like the wine, the bar has aged into maturity. They
added barstools here, a couch there, a cocktail there. They changed
those lights. Along with a rotating pair of $5 craft beers that shy from
dull IPAs or overfamiliar favorites, the shop serves a winter prosecco
cocktail ($8) with spiced pear nectar and walnut bitters, creating
complexity out of an often cloying drink variety. The bar serves Steve
Jones cheese and Olympic Provisions salami, sure, but also a selection
of savory pies.

The summer cocktail is a sangria that evolved from a
mistake: an overripe batch of wine. “It was never meant to be a
product,” Sharp says. “We salvaged a batch of rosé and put it on as
sangria. People just loved it. They asked, ‘Are you bringing back the
sangria?’” The winery now sells the sangria in stores.

A former touring musician and graphic designer, Sharp is
still improvising, playing around with details. “I’ll take risks,” he
says. “We made an orange wine, where you ferment the white wine on the
skins. We had no idea how it was going to turn out.”